(1) IT CAUGHT ON IN A FLASH. Shelley Roche-Jacques considers “Flash fiction as a distinct literary form: some thoughts on time, space, and context” in a research paper available at Taylor & Francis Online.

…In this article, I consider what makes flash fiction qualitatively different from the short story. I demonstrate that the mobilisation of a story world is necessary for a text to function as flash fiction and that this can be a useful way of distinguishing the form from prose poetry. This is a new and necessary distinction, as critics and writers seem to have found the two forms very difficult to separate. I also consider how the interpretation of short texts is highly bound up with the context in which readers encounter them….

(2) NALO HOPKINSON Q&A. In Shelf Awareness for Friday, November 22, 2024, “Reading with…Nalo Hopkinson”.

…On your nightstand now: 

Honestly? I’m currently listening to the audiobook of my most recent novel, Blackheart Man. Hearing it in someone else’s words makes it almost like a different novel.

Favorite book when you were a child:

A two-parter: Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. My dad had them in English translation from Homeric Greek. I skipped all the “boring” parts and just read the bits with monsters, witches, and ghosts in them. And I rooted for poor Ulysses to finally get home from the wars and be reunited with his wife, Penelope. Though I didn’t expect the way he would get rid of all the men who were eating and drinking him out of house and home while they clamored for Penelope to admit her husband was dead and marry one of them. Funny thing is, I tried reading The Iliad a couple of years ago, and I stopped. It was too difficult! As a kid, I didn’t get as frustrated at struggling through the language….

(3) ITALO CALVINO. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Italo Calvino is one of Italy’s SF grandmasters (but of course you knew that) and pioneer of Italian neo-realism.
He was the son of biologists and almost became an agricultural applied biologist when World War II loomed. He joined the Communist resistance (because they were the most organised.

His first book was speculative fiction. He did then try mundane ‘literary’ fiction but just could not do it and preferred to write what he wanted to read.  Also, he found that using speculative fiction metaphors was a useful way to discuss possibly controversial issues.

This week’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 takes a look at Italo Calvino and his work.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Italian author of Invisible Cities, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Cosmicomics and other celebrated novels, fables and short stories of the 20th Century. Calvino (1923 -1985) had a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Despite his parents being scientists, who dearly wanted him to be a scientist too, and his time fighting with the Partisans in Liguria in WWII during which his parents were held hostage by the Nazis, Calvino turned away from realism in his writing. Ideally, he said, he would have liked to be alive in the Enlightenment. He moved towards the fantastical, drawing on his childhood reading while collecting a huge number of the fables of Italy and translating them from dialect into Italian to enrich the shared culture of his fellow citizens. His fresh perspective on the novel continues to inspire writers and delight readers in Italian and in translations around the world.

With Guido Bonsaver (Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford), Jennifer Burns (Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick) and Beatrice Sica (Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL).

You can access the programme here.

(4) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites listeners to chow down on chicken tikka masala with Gareth L. Powell in Episode 241 of the Eating the Fantastic podcast.

Powell has twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel — in 2014 for Ack-Ack Macaque and in 2019 for Embers of War — and has become one of the most shortlisted authors in the award’s 50-year history. He’s also been a finalist for the Locus Award (twice), the British Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, the Premios Ignotus, and the Canopus Award. His short fiction has appeared in the magazines Clarkesworld, Interzone, Galaxy, Worlds of IF, and others, and has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Shine: The Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.

As a freelancer writer, he has written a strip for long-running British comic 2000 AD, articles for The Guardian, Irish Times, Acoustic Magazine, and SFX Magazine, and currently writes a monthly column about future tech for The Engineer. He’s the Managing Editor of Stars and Sabers Publishing, the publishing imprint he founded with his spouse, the American author Jendia Gammon.


We discussed the way a Diana Wynne Jones critique of his teenaged writing was a complete revelation in how to write fiction, how an adversarial relationship with a university professor who didn’t want him writing science fiction actually ended up helping him, the New Year’s resolution which led to him to both kick smoking and write a novel, how reading William Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome shook him up and made him realize what kind of short stories he really wanted to write, the message he most wants to convey to beginning writers in his workshops, the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone, how to make a good impression when approaching an editor in a convention bar, the way he developed his propulsive writing style, why he’s so receptive to editorial suggestions, what it was like collaborating with Peter F. Hamilton and Aliette de Bodard, his techniques for deciding which of many story ideas you should write, the reason his mother refuses to read his books, why writing novels can be like telling a joke and waiting two years for somebody to laugh, and much more.

(5) APPLAUSE WITHHELD. [Item by Steven French.] I think it’s safe to say that Guardian writer Stuart Heritage isn’t a fan: “Pretentious, moi?: Josh Brolin’s poetry about Dune has landed, whether we like it or not”.

When it comes to pretension, Dune isn’t exactly left wanting. In print, the books are a progressively abstract and deranged space opera about a young man and his son, the 3,500-year-old god worm. Onscreen the films are long and portentous screensavers that seem to really hate bald people, or bafflingly bad HBO prequel shows. But two media where Dune has yet to hit full pretension are photography and poetry – until now.

Because next week, Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser and Dune actor Josh Brolin will present an exhibition of photography and poetry from Dune: Exposures. You may have heard of Dune: Exposures. It’s a £50 coffee table book of behind the scenes photography that came out in February. Not that you will necessarily know it as that, because the book bills itself as an “exploratory artistic memoir”.

So, for example, one page has a nice picture of Timothée Chalamet, but on the opposite page is this poetic description: “Your cheekbones jump toward what are youth-laden eyes that slide down a prominent nose and onto lips of a certain poetry.” It is less a traditional poem and more the sort of thing ChatGPT would blurt out if you asked it to describe a crayon drawing of a melting Cabbage Patch Kid. There’s also a photo of Florence Pugh sticking her tongue out, which inspired Brolin to write: “You can feel her cells preparing for a thinner air, a higher ground.” And you can’t, really, because it’s just a photo of a woman in her 20s killing time by arsing about a bit.

(6) YOUNGEST EXOPLANET FOUND… AND WHY IT IS IMPORTANT. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Go back to my youth – which is quite a while to around the start of Doctor Who – and we simply did not know that there were planets around other stars, let alone that virtually all at least solo stars and at least some binary stars have exoplanets: today we know that planets seem to be fairly universal about stars. All of which is good news for those hoping to find an Earth-like planet capable of supporting life elsewhere in our galaxy.

Now, our sun, the Sun, formed some 4.6 billion years ago. Meanwhile, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has it that the Earth formed 4.567 billion years ago. This means that the Earth formed somewhere around 40 to 60 million years into our star’s life.  Could it be that planets have to form real early in a star’s life for there to be enough time for life to evolve into complex life (capable of brewing and enjoying real ale)?

In the run up to 2018, astronomers found gaps in dust disks around proto-stars that were around a million years old. These gaps were interpreted as proto-planets ‘sweeping’ lanes in the dust disks around early stars.

Then in 2020, astronomers detected four clear lanes within a dust disk around a proto-stellar less than 500,000 years old and 470 light years away.

Importantly, we need to remember that gaps in dust lanes is not the same as actually detecting a planet, or a proto-planet.

This brings us up-to-date and the latest discovery which has been made using the NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The star, which goes by the catchy moniker IRAS 04125+2902, is a member of the Taurus–Auriga star-forming region some 520 light years from the Brighton Worldcon. Importantly, it is only three million years old. The planet detected is Jupiter-sized in a short, 8.8-day orbit about the proto-star. The star itself is about 0.7 the mass of the Sun, which makes it a K-type star.

The discovery was lucky.  Normally, planets form out of the circumstellar dust cloud about a protostar and so they are in the same plane as the dust disc. TESS works by detecting the dip in light from stars when a planet passes (transits) in front of it. This means that detecting planets this way should not work in the presence of circumstellar dust discs as the dust hides both the planet and the star. However, for some reason the planet is orbiting in a different plane to the dust disc! The researchers themselves say, “the origin of this misalignment is unclear”.

Taking all the evidence together, we now have hard evidence that planets form really early in a star’s life!

Now, if it took 4.567 billion years for life on Earth to get to a point where it was capable to have the technology to create real ale and enjoyed, then this proof of an early start to planets makes it more likely that planets around stars that have anticipated lifetimes of six or seven or more billon years, then they will likely have the time for real ale generating, and enjoying, species to arise.

The primary research is Barber M. G., et al. (2024) A giant planet transiting a 3-Myr protostar with a misaligned disk. Nature, vol. 635, p574-577.

(7) THE MEAL OF YOUR DREAMS. Tim Burton-inspired holiday menu is being offered at a place in Long Beach, CA: “Broken Spirits in Long Beach goes all-in on ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’-themed holiday dinners” at Longbeachize.

Broken Spirits Distillery in Downtown Long Beach is getting into the holiday spirit with not jingly bells but in a more macabre way. The space has becomed filled with creepy takes on Disney characters with none other than Jack Skellington and the Oogie Boogie Man greeting you at the door.

On top of it all, a $75, five-course, three-cocktail, three spirit tastings, “Nightmare Before Christmas”-themed dinner will be served Monday through Friday nightly at 7PM….

The menu includes such things as:

Jack Skellington’s Prime Wagyu Slider: Snake River Farms American wagyu ground beef | House-made squid ink bun | New cheese | Smoked pork belly

Oogie Boogie Garlic Cajun Linguine: Squid ink linguine | Pana Pesca Chilean Mussels | Cajun sauce | Porchetta | Pecorino Romano

(8) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

Anniversary — Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Twenty-eight years ago on this date, Star Trek: First Contact premiered. 

It was the eighth film of the Trek films, and the second of the Next Gen films following Star Trek Generations. The story was written by Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore.   It was directed by Jonathan Frakes from the screenplay by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore. 

It had the Next Generation cast plus Alfre Woodard, James Cromwell and Alice Krige, the latter as the Borg Queen. She reprised the role in Voyager and Picard, and recently voiced the role in Lower Decks. 

A lot of titles were tossed around — Star Trek: Borg, Star Trek: Destinies, Star Trek: Future Generations and Star Trek: Generations II were all considered before Star Trek: Resurrection was chosen and then abandoned when 20th Century Fox announced the title of the fourth Alien film as Alien Resurrection, so the film was finally Star Trek: First Contact.

It did very well at the box office making one hundred fifty million against a budget of fifty million. 

First Contact received generally positive reviews upon release. The Independent said “For the first time, a Star Trek movie actually looks like something more ambitious than an extended TV show.”  And the Los Angeles Times exclaimed, “First Contact does everything you’d want a Star Trek film to do, and it does it with cheerfulness and style.” 

Audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes currently give it a most excellent rating of eighty-nine percent. 

It was nominated for a Hugo at LoneStarCon 2, the year that Babylon 5’s “Severed Dreams” won. 

It is streaming on Prime Video but surprisingly is not on Paramount +.

(9) COMICS SECTION.

• Eek! discusses a monster’s health insurance.
• Dinosaur Comics saves a writer’s life – but at what cost?
• Wumo doesn’t recommend “hands free” operating commands.
• Chicken Wings Comics kisses ChatGPT’s butt.

(10) HOW THE CLAY SAUSAGE IS MADE. Deadline offers a look “Behind The Scenes On ‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’”.

The prospect of creating a stop motion film is daunting, to say the least. The process of taking a photo, altering a scene slightly, then taking another photo, over and over can almost make the medium seem pointlessly complicated for a filmmaker… and yet, there is something about the handcrafted aesthetic of a stop motion film that can’t be matched by anything digital. And that special something is where Aardman Animations has made their mark….

… The tour begins with a stop in the puppet department, led by puppet designer Anne King. Here, we are introduced to the process of creating the puppets out of both silicone and clay. “The clay takes quite a long time to sculpt,” says King, “so if the animators on the studio floor have to do a big shot with Gromit walking across a set on all fours, getting it all looking perfect is actually very time consuming. So, we developed this silicone puppet so the animators can actually get a lot of movement out of it without going through all the sculpting.” However, since the silicone isn’t expressive like clay, they can’t use full silicone puppets for the stop motion. “With the clay, you can sculpt it to anything you want basically, so a lot of the hands and faces are of clay just to get that expressiveness.”

Even though silicone can’t be altered once cast, Park says the advancements in the technology have helped to maintain their handmade aesthetic. “The heart of our whole ethos is to keep everything handmade and keep the clay quality of it all, with the fingerprints and everything, which is the key to keeping the charm and the authenticity.”…

(11) ELIGIBLE FOR THE OSCAR. Animation Magazine reports these “31 Titles Are Eligible for the Animated Feature Film Academy Award This Year”. (With hotlinks to their articles about the films, if any.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced feature films eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film, Documentary Feature Film and International Feature Film categories for the 97th Academy Awards.

Thirty-one features are eligible for consideration in the Animated Feature Film category this year. Some of the films have not yet had their required qualifying release and must fulfill that requirement and comply with all the category’s other qualifying rules to advance in the voting process. In 2023, 33 titles were eligible (a record high), and in 2022, 27 movies made the cut, while only 26 were considered in 2021….

The eligible animated features are:

• Art College 1994
• Captain Avispa
• Chicken for Linda!
• The Colors Within
• The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
• Despicable Me 4
• Flow
• The Garfield Movie
• Ghost Cat Anzu
• The Glassworker
• The Imaginary
• Inside Out 2
• Kensuke’s Kingdom
• Kung Fu Panda 4
• Living Large
• Look Back
• The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
• Mars Express
• Memoir of a Snail
• Moana 2
• Piece by Piece
• Rocket Club: Across the Cosmos
• Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds
• Spellbound
• Sultana’s Dream
• That Christmas
• Thelma the Unicorn
• Transformers One
• Ultraman: Rising
• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
• The Wild Robot

(12) MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA. “No politics allowed at this sword-fighting club near Pittsburgh” at NPR.

…It’s a tournament — as well as a party — billed as Friday Night Fights.

There are plenty of rules in a sword fight. But there’s one rule that applies after the fighters have put down their weapons: no talk of politics.

The evolution of the rule started around 2016, when club owner Josh Parise says he was getting fed up with the rancor of political discourse in the U.S. — personal attacks were on the rise, even within families, as was cancel culture.

“I couldn’t tolerate the lack of decency between human beings,” says Parise, whose club focuses on historical European martial arts.

“None of it made sense anymore,” he says.

And then there were a few would-be sword fighters who came to the club and didn’t treat others well. Parise had to tell them to get on their horses and leave.

“It’s infuriating to me, so with this place, we just don’t allow that to happen,” Parise says….

(13) NOT THE DIAGRAM PRIZE. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] The Diagram Prize is for books with the oddest title of the year. But why should book readers have all the fun? What about academics? This week saw the publication in Science Advances of the paper entitled, “Stiffness-tunable velvet worm–inspired soft adhesive robot”.

There’s got to be more peculiar ones out there.  If you see any, do pass them on…

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Christian Brunschen, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cat Eldridge.]